TOP STORIES

The Tourism Industry Association (TIA) published another bright outlook regarding New Zealand’s booming tourism sector late last week, with Chairman Grant Lilly commenting “it’s an exciting time to be in tourism”. New Zealand is on track to achieve its Tourism 2025 goals and there’s no doubt the future is looking excellent.

However, Mr Lilly did acknowledge a couple of key challenges, such as attracting the right talent to the industry and ensuring businesses can cope with fast growth.

“The speed of growth is certainly creating some challenges for us, amongst them the persistent issues of seasonality, lack of regional dispersal, insufficient infrastructure investment and the growing demand for people and skills,” Mr Lilly said.

Mr Lilly added that the demand for trained tourism workers is especially important, as “many sectors are striving to attract more people and skills, so this is not a problem that is unique to tourism […] it does mean we have plenty of competition for the best and the brightest.”

The Chairman’s comments are a further reminder of the importance of quality tourism courses and training in New Zealand.

What winter blues? For many tourism operators, the cold season has been red hot in terms of visitor growth. According to figures published by Statistics New Zealand, 10,000 international visitors arrived in the country in August to enjoy a winter holiday.

Tourism New Zealand chief executive Kevin Bowler is incredibly pleased with this result.

“It is great to see this momentum continue after reaching last month’s milestone of three million visitors,” Mr Bowler said.

“To have sustained such strong growth through the winter months is great news for the industry and it is even better to see that growth in holiday arrivals is leading the charge.”

As a sidenote, ITC runs regular ‘advisory board’ meetings with key businesses in the industry, and they too continue to report positive growth – it has definitely been an exceptional year for tourism so far.

IN BRIEF

New Zealand has been voted as the second best country for expats to work and live abroad in the HSBC Expat Explorer Survey. NZ is seen as a great place for quality of life, work-life balance and quality education. Read more.

The number of international students coming to study in New Zealand, especially from India and China, reached new records in August. The rise in foreign students has been “a boon to local education businesses,” reports the NBR. Read more.

Resource consent has now been granted for the International Convention Centre, a result the TIA has spoken out in favour of. TIA chief executive Chris Roberts said New Zealand “has been lagging behind” other countries when it comes to convention centres, and is pleased this new development will “allow us to target a valuable new sector of the convention market that we have not previously been able to accommodate”. Read more.

After releasing its first sustainability report last week, Air New Zealand is now encouraging shareholders to become more involved in its sustainability aims. The airline is proposing a ‘gividend’ scheme which would allow shareholders to reinvest their dividend payments into not-for-profits or other organisations that focus on environmental and social issues. Read more.

The South Island’s iconic Lake Tekapo has been voted the best place in the world to propose marriage in a Japanese online poll/competition, run by the travel agency HIS. This is a good sign of New Zealand’s rising popularity within the Japanese market. Read more.